Rachmael ben Applebaum suspects something shady is going on at the Whale’s Mouth colony in the Fomalhaut system. A company called THL has a teleportation device that can take people from Earth to Whale’s Mouth in only fifteen minutes. Strangely it’s only a one-way trip, and Rachmael thinks the video from THL showing a paradise full of happy colonists is being faked. Rachmael owns a now-obsolete freighter company, but with the help of the police agency Lies Incorporated he plans to take his last remaining ship to the Fomalhaut system, in a trip that will take eighteen years one way, to find out for sure what is going on at Whale’s Mouth.

Ace Books asked Dick to expand this novella-length story so they could publish it as a full novel, but they turned down the second part he wrote. Instead they ended up publishing The Unteleported Man as one half of an Ace Double. The copy I read was backed with Dr. Futurity. The expanded material (Rachmael on Whale’s Mouth after being shot by an LSD-tipped dart) was inserted somewhat inelegantly into the middle of the story and eventually published as Lies, Inc. in 1983 after Dick died.  

Cast of characters

See Lies, Inc.

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After a few chapters set in Berkeley, California on the last day of modern civilization in 1981 we jump ahead seven years to a world trying to rebuild itself after a nuclear disaster. The mentally unhinged (and telekinetic somehow) Bluthgeld is the man responsible for raining down the nuclear bombs, and he hides out as Mr. Tree in a West Marin commune where the rest of the story takes place. The armless and legless (and also telekinetic) Hoppy Harrington, who had been held down most of his life, is able to become BMOC of this West Marin community until a showdown with seven-year-old Edie (and Bill) Keller that caught me off guard.*

On top of all this there is a man stuck in orbit, since a rocket to Mars had been launched moments before the disaster. He serves as a DJ to the inhabitants of Earth as he passes over each day. Even Stuart McConchie in this one manages to rise above the standard bland everyman in many PKD books. The whole thing comes together as one of Dick’s most accessible novels, and I would highly recommend it.

*Yes, I read this before, but my memory can charitably be described as not good.

Cast of characters

• Stuart McConchie – salesman at Modern TV Sales & Service before the disaster
• Jim Fergesson – owner of Modern TV Sales & Service. Modern TV Sales and Service is also the name of the store owned by Roger Lindahl in Puttering About in a Small Land. Jim Fergesson shares his name with the owner of Modern TV Sales and Service in Voices from the Street and the mechanic in Humpty Dumpty in Oakland.
• Bruno Bluthgeld aka Jack Tree– the titular Dr. Bloodmoney. Responsible for a nuclear fallout disaster in 1972 and responsible for the nuclear attack in 1981
• Doctor Stockstill – Bluthgeld’s psychoanalyst before the attack
• Bonny Keller – member of the West Marin community who had referred Bluthgeld to Stockstill
• George Keller – Bonny’s husband
• Edie Keller – the Keller’s young daughter although she was fathered by Andrew Gill
• Bill Keller – Edie’s unborn twin who lives and communicates inside of her
• Hoppy Harrington – a phocomelus with telekinetic powers
• Walt and Lydia Dangerfield – supposed to be the first couple to emigrate to Mars. Instead Walt ends up in orbit around Earth after the nuclear attack
• Mr. Austurias – member of the West Marin commune who was killed for attempting to track down Bluthgeld
• June Raub – on the West Marin planning committee
• Andrew Gill – a cigarette entrepreneur after the attack
• Eldon Blaine – a glasses salesman from Bolinas
• Orion Stroud – chairman of the West Marin school board
• Hal Barnes – a new school teacher in West Marin
• Dean Hardy – Stuart’s business partner in a homeostatic vermin trap business
• Paul Dietz – West Marin’s newspaper man

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Jones, a precog who can see one year into the future, is an interesting character in a world ruled by relativism where all absolute thought, in an effort to stamp out extremism and war, is forbidden. With his apparent proof of certainty, Jones becomes a demagogue, whipping his followers into a frenzy against the threat of amoeba-like aliens that have started to land on Earth. When it turns out these alien drifters are mostly harmless, something Jones didn’t initially know with his limited view into the future, he martyrs himself so as to blame his death on the relativists before he would have been exposed as a fraud.

The book’s two storylines don’t come together very well. The mutants being engineered to survive on Venus don’t have much to do with what is going on with Jones, but even Dick admitted the book would have been stronger if he had found a way to tie those two threads together.

*for example: moist skin, moist ground, moist legs, moist sack (don’t ask), moist car (how?), moist skin (again), moist breath, moist fog, moist atmosphere, moist hay, moist lips, moist lips (again) and moist air.

Cast of characters

• Floyd Jones – a precog who can see exactly one year into the future although he lacks the ability to change the future when it happens
• Louis, Frank, Vivian, Garry, Dieter, Irma, Syd – mutants engineered to survive on Venus who live in a moist refuge in San Francisco
• Doctor Rafferty – oversees the refuge
• Doug Cussick – member of the secret service
• Nina – Cussick’s wife
• Pearson – security director of the Baltimore secret service
• Max Kaminski – Cussick’s senior political instructor
• Hyndshaw – a traveling salesman who picks up Jones when he is hitchhiking
• Tyler Fleming – a young member of the secret service

The post The World Jones Made appeared first on the world Dick made.

A group of sightseers at a particle accelerator falls through a proton beam when a platform collapses. As they imagine they recover they actually wake into a chain of worlds created in the mind of each individual as they regain consciousness one by one.

In the first half of the book they are trapped in the mind of war veteran Arthur Silvester whose world is ruled by an Old Testament-like god, the titular eye in the sky.* After incapacitating Silvester the group progresses through several more worlds until there is a twist around whether or not Hamilton’s wife is a Communist sympathizer, a question the book begins with when Hamilton is fired from his job at a missile research facility over the Red Scare concerns about his wife’s allegiances.

Overall a funny and thought-provoking early work.

*Originally intended to be the Biblical Judeo-Christian God but rewritten by Dick at the publisher’s request as a Muslim god of an obscure Arabic cult so as not to offend any readers of 1950’s America.

Cast of characters

• Jack Hamilton – employee at the California Maintenance missile research lab
• Marsha Hamilton – Hamilton’s wife
• Colonel Edwards – head of California Maintenance
• Charley McFeyffe – captain of security at California Maintenance
• Arthur Silvester – a war veteran. Creator of universe 1 overseen by the eye in the sky
• Bill Laws – the guide at the Bevatron particle accelerator
• Edith Pritchet – creator of the sexless and inoffensive universe 2
• David Pritchet – Edith’s son
• Joan Reiss – creator of the paranoiac universe 3
• Guy Tillingford – head of the Electronics Development Agency
• Horace Clamp – a prophet of the Second Bab
• Silky – a barfly Hamilton first meets in Silvester’s world

The post Eye in the Sky appeared first on the world Dick made.

In the 1990s a civil war has broken out between colonists on the moon and Earth. Time magazine’s 1996 Man of the Year Ragle Gumm is the only one who can predict where the missiles fired from the moon will land, and he’s able to keep Earth safe, that is until he has a change of heart and begins to side with the lunatics, as those on the moon are called.

A psychotic break follows and he regresses in his mind to the 1950s America of his childhood. The military then carefully constructs a fake 1950s small town filled with a few handlers along with a majority who are brainwashed into also thinking it’s real. Ragle still makes his predictions, although now it’s under the guise of a newspaper contest where he earns a 1950s wage figuring out Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?

It would be easy to pick apart the book’s logic (how exactly does Ragle’s gift of prediction work and what do the strips of paper that Ragle finds when he begins to see through the simulated reality really mean?) but I love how Dick anticipated a baby boomer nostalgia for the 50s as he watched the Eisenhower years come to an end.

Cast of characters

• Ragle Gumm – all-time winner in the newspaper’s Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? contest. Lives with his sister’s family
• Margo Nielson – Ragle’s sister
• Vic Nielson – Ragle’s brother-in-law
• Sammy Nielson – Vic and Margo’s young son
• Bill and Junie Black – Vic and Margo’s neighbors
• Stuart Lowery – Gazette representative
• Kay Keitelbein – neighborhood volunteer for Civil Defense
• Walter Keitelbein – Kay’s son
• The Kesselmans – Ragle encounters them in their house on the outskirts of town when he first tries to escape

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Back on the real Earth the pre-cog employees at P. P. Layouts try to determine which consumer goods will be popular so that they can be minified and sent to Mars for the colonists to use in their Perky Pat environments. This balance is upset when the industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from the Proxima system with a potent new drug that he plans to market to the colonists as a more effective escape from the drudgery of Mars.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch remains my favorite PKD book even after having read them all. You might assume it was inspired by the use of LSD, but Dick claims to have not yet tried that particular drug at this point in his life. Instead, fueled by large quantities of amphetamines, he wrote this during an incredibly prolific two-year period in 1963-64 when he also wrote some of my other favorites including The Game Players of Titan, Now Wait for Last Year, The Simulacra and Clans of the Alphane Moon.

Is the world of Perky Pat the same world from The Crack in Space? Who knows, but while in the mind of Walt, one of the colonists catches Jim Briskin, everyone’s favorite newsclown (or maybe just mine), on TV.

Cast of characters

• Barney Mayerson – a pre-cog. Head of pre-fash marketing at  P. P. Layouts
• Roni Fugate – a pre-cog. Barney’s assistant and mistress
• Leo Bulero – chairman of the board at P. P. Layouts
• Emily Hnatt – Barney’s ex-wife
• Richard Hnatt – Emily’s current husband
• Palmer Eldritch – the interplan industrialist who returns from Proxima
• Sam Regan, Mary Regan, Tod Morris, Norman Schein, Helen Morris, Fran Schein – Mars colonists
• Allen and Charlotte Faine – disc jockeys in a Mars satellite
• Felix Blau – head of the police agency
• Dr. Wily Denkmal – runs an E therapy clinic in Germany

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Dick’s brilliant conceit for an anti-drug novel involves undercover narc Bob Arctor assigned to observe himself through holo-scanners hidden in the house where he and his doper friends live. As ‘Fred’ he watches himself while wearing a scramble suit so that his cover isn’t blown, but he also abuses more and more Substance D until he loses all sense of his identity. In the end he no longer recognizes that he is actually Bob Arctor and is sent to a clinic for barely functioning addicts.

Richard Linklater’s film based on the book is one of the best PKD adaptations. Winona Ryder was recovering from a high-profile issue with drugs at the time as was Robert Downey, Jr. who is particularly great (pre-Iron Man) as Arctor’s weaselly roommate Jim Barris. The movie perfectly captures the paranoia of Dick’s work, and A Scanner Darkly is Dick at his most paranoid. Both are hilarious (the movie is very faithful to the book) but also bleak, since Dick wants to make it clear drugs will unavoidably consume your life until there is nothing left.

Cast of characters

• Bob Arctor aka Fred aka Bruce – an undercover narcotics agent
• Jerry Fabin – an addict at the beginning of the book who sees (and feels) aphids everywhere before he gets sent to a Federal Clinic
• Charles Freck – a doper in Bob’s circle of friends
• Donna Hawthorne – Bob Arctor’s girl and the small-time dealer he’s working
• Jim Barris – Bob’s roommate
• Ernie Luckman – Bob’s roommate
• Hank – Fred’s superior

Other things to know

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. – 1 Corinthians 13:12 (King James Version)

This Bible verse, which has inspired the titles of many works including this one, comes at the end of 1 Corinthians 13 when Paul is discussing the importance of love. ‘Glass’ here is often translated as mirror. Now we see things imperfectly, but at the end of time (or when we meet Jesus or whatever), everything will be made clear.

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In 2203 a Quizmaster, chosen randomly from over six billion people, rules the solar system. This Quizmaster has to fend off assassins, and even with the protection of a telepathic corps, it’s rare for a Quizmaster to stay in power very long. Reese Verrick though manages to hold onto the position for ten years until lowly electronics repairman Leon Cartwright figures out how to game the system.

The main story is entertaining in the pulpy style of the 50s even if it does get bogged down in a lot of jargon (bottle twitching, Minimax M-game theory) that isn’t very well explained. It has one too many things going on with a side story about a mythical tenth planet, supposedly discovered by some crackpot, whose followers travel to the far reaches of the solar system to try to find it.

Dick said that he borrowed from the other sci-fi greats of the era when writing this one, like A.E. Van Vogt (I assume that’s where the wooden characterization comes from) and Alfred Bester whose The Demolished Man directly inspires the telepathic corps that protects the Quizmaster. The speechifying Ted Benteley has a lot in common with the angry and idealistic Stuart Hadley from Voices From the Street which Dick wrote just before writing Solar Lottery.

Cast of characters

• Ted Benteley – pledges allegiance to Verrick without knowing Cartwright is the new Quizmaster
• Reese Verrick – the former Quizmaster
• Eleanor Stevens – Verrick’s secretary. A former telepath who gives up her ability to stay on with Verrick
• Peter Wakeman – one of the Quizmaster’s teeps
• Leon Cartwright – the new Quizmaster
• John Preston – deceased figurehead of the Prestonites. Preached of a undiscovered tenth planet called the Flame Disc
• Rita O’neill – a Prestonite. Cartwright’s niece
• Major Shaeffer – part of the Quizmaster’s teep Corps
• Herbert Moore – a biochemist working for Verrick
• Al and Laura Davis – Ted Benteley’s longtime friends
• Keith Pellig – the assassin chosen by the Convention
• Bill Konklin & Mary Uzich – Prestonites on board the ship to the Flame Disc
• Captain Groves – the pilot of the ship on the way to the Flame Disc
• Judge Waring – the judge who decides whether Benteley broke his oath to Verrick

The post Solar Lottery appeared first on the world Dick made.

Due to a reversal of time called the Hobart Phase, things move backwards. The dead come back to life. The living Benjamin Button their way to infancy and then eventually migrate into a nearby womb, although not necessarily that of their mother. People do some things in reverse, like regurgitate their food instead of eating it and puff smoke back into cigarette butts. They don’t walk backwards though, or talk backwards other than saying ‘bye’ as a greeting and ‘hello’ when they leave. They also say ‘food’ when they curse instead of saying ‘shit.’ It really is as idiotic as it sounds.

When the dead come back to life they call out feebly from their graves under the ground, and if someone happens to be around to hear them then a vitarium is contacted to dig the person up before they run out of air (and die again? and come back to life again?). Seems like there would be a better way to handle this bringing back of the dead.

A religious cult called the Udi, currently led by Raymond Roberts, has to contend with their old leader, the Anarch Thomas Peak, coming back to life. The timing is right for him to rise from the grave, but they don’t know where he was buried. That particular piece of information has been eradicated by the Erads at the library. They are the real villains, since their job is to destroy all books… you know, since things are going in reverse.

Sebastian Hermes, owner of a local vitarium, stumbles on the Anarch’s grave while freeing another deader. Sebastian takes it upon himself to keep the Anarch safe from the Udi, who most certainly want him dead again (although it turns out they don’t). But the Library does want him dead again, since they just got done eradicating all of the Anarch’s writing, and if he’s alive he might start teaching everything they just destroyed, especially now that he’s seen the afterlife.

I disliked this one when I first read it. I also hated rereading it, but now there are some notes…

Cast of characters

• Sebastian Hermes – owner of the Flask of Hermes Vitarium
• Lotta Hermes – Sebastian’s young wife
• Father Faine – Sebastian’s employee
• Dr. Sign – the doctor employed by Sebastian
• Bob Lindy – Sebastian’s engineer
• R.C. Buckley – Sebastian’s salesman
• Cheryl Vale – Sebastian’s secretary
• Joseph Tinbane – a police officer who gets involved with Lotta
• Anarch Peak – the leader of the Udi cult before his death
• Raymond Roberts – current leader of the Udi cult
• Douglas Appleford – a library employee
• Mavis McGuire – chief librarian at the People’s Topical Library
• Carl Gantrix – Raymond Robert’s attorney
• Ann Fisher – McGuire’s daughter sent to seduce Sebastian
• Tony Giacometti – represents a third party from Rome also interested in the Anarch

Other things to know

• The Hobart Phase – a time reversal that started in 1986 named after Alex Hobart who predicted it
• The Erads – they work in the library eradicating all existing books. The main antagonist when we find out the Udi don’t intend to harm the Anarch
• F.N.M. – the Free Negro Municipality

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He wrote this one first in 1976, and when his publisher wanted to make some changes Dick instead rewrote it as an entirely new book which was published as VALIS in 1981. Radio Free Albemuth itself wasn’t published until 1985 several years after he died. The story from Radio Free Albemuth shows up in VALIS briefly, altered and in a much more tripped-out fashion, as a movie that Dick and his friends go see.

The book starts out narrated by Dick himself before switching to the point of view of his friend Nicholas Brady and then switching back to Dick’s POV at the end. It implies Dick and Nicholas are one and the same, just like Dick and Horselover Fat in VALIS, although that’s never revealed to be the case here. Rather Brady serves as a what if? version of Dick if he had left Berkeley sooner and had a different career. Some autobiographical details, like the burglary of Dick’s house (which he was convinced was orchestrated by the police or FBI) make their way into the story, but Brady inherits many of the other events from Dick’s life, such as being alerted to his son’s undiagnosed hernia by VALIS’s pink light.

The overall plot involves the effort of Brady, guided by VALIS, to stand up to the tyrannical rule of the U.S. president Ferris F. Fremont. Brady plans to sneak subliminal messages about Fremont’s ties to the Communist party into an album released by his record company, although I’m not sure how that would topple a totalitarian government that kills and imprisons with impunity. The middle section of the book told from Brady’s POV is the least interesting as it deals with the long-winded theology about VALIS which is a satellite that is also God… I think. One day I will read Dick’s 1000-page Exegesis and his VALIS theories may all make sense.

In the end Brady and Sadassa Silvia (who had also been contacted by VALIS) are both killed by Ferris F. Fremont’s stooges. After the U.S. destroys the VALIS satellite the opposition doesn’t stand much of a chance. The government lets Dick live imprisoned in a labor camp, and in a clever turn of events, at least from a meta point of view, they release agitprop books they’ve written under his name.

The low-budget 2010 movie, with some really low-budget special effects, most likely would only appeal to fans of the book. It’s very faithful, including all the elements that were probably silly even by the standards of the 1970s, although I do like Shea Whigham’s low-key portrayal of PKD.

Cast of characters

• Nicholas Brady – an aimless resident of Berkeley turned record executive in Southern California
• Rachel – Nicholas’s wife
• Phil Dick – the part-time narrator as himself
• Ferris F. Fremont – the president. A Nixon stand-in, although in this case Fremont is a sleeper for the Communist party
• Vivian Kaplan – a young FAPer (Friends of the American People) Dick gets involved with
• Sadassa Silvia – a young woman also contacted by VALIS who works with Nicholas to put subliminal messages in the albums put out by Progressive Records. Played by Alanis Morissette in the movie.

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